Read Online In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online

she isn't supposed to."
          "What's that, Dave?" she said.
          "Would you please come out here and bring your friends with you?"
          She rode her Appaloosa out from under the eave. Her tennis shoes, pink shorts, and T-shirt were sopping, and her tanned skin glistened with water. She grinned under her straw hat.
          "Alf, what happened the last time you took Tripod for a ride?"
          She looked off reflectively at the rain falling in the trees. Tripod squirmed in her hands. He was a beautiful coon, silver-tipped, with a black mask and black rings on his thick tail.
          "I told him not to do that no more, Dave."
          "It's 'anymore.' "
          "Anymore. He ain't gonna do it anymore, Dave."
          She was grinning again. Tex, her Appaloosa, was steel gray, with white stockings and a spray of black and white spots on his rump. Last week Tripod had spiked his claws into Tex's rump, and Alafair had been thrown end over end into the tomato plants.
          "Where's Bootsie?"
          "At the store in town."
          "How about putting Tex in the shed and coming in for some ice cream? You think you can handle that, little guy?"
          "Yeah, that's a pretty good idea, Dave," she said, as though both of us had just thought our way through a problem. She continued to look at me, her dark eyes full of light. "What about Tripod?"
          "I think Tripod probably needs some ice cream, too."
          Her face beamed. She set Tripod on top of the hutches, then slid down off her horse into a mud puddle. I watched her hook Tripod to his chain and lead Tex back to the lot. She was eleven years old now. Her body was round and hard and full of energy, her Indian-black hair as shiny as a raven's wing; when she smiled, her eyes squinted almost completely shut. Six years ago I had pulled her from a wobbling envelope of air inside the submerged wreckage of a twin-engine plane out on the salt.
          She hooked Tripod's chain on the back porch and went into her bedroom to change clothes. I put a small amount of ice cream in two bowls and set them on the table. Above the counter a telephone number was written on the small blackboard we used for messages. Alafair came back into the kitchen, rubbing her head with a towel. She wore her slippers, her elastic-waisted blue jeans, and an oversized University of Southwestern Louisiana T-shirt. She kept blowing her bangs out of her eyes.
          "You promise you're going to eat your supper?" I said.
          "Of course. What difference does it make if you eat ice cream before supper instead of after? You're silly sometimes, Dave."
          "Oh, I see."
          "You have funny ideas sometimes."
          "You're growing up on me."
          "What?"
          "Never mind."
          She brought Tripod's pan in from the porch and put a scoop of ice cream in it. The rain had slackened, and I could see the late sun breaking through the mist, like a pink wafer, above the sugarcane at the back of my property.
          "Oh, I forgot, a man called," she said. "That's his number."
          "Who was it?"
          "He said he was a friend of yours. I couldn't hear because it was real noisy."
          "Next time have the person spell his name and write it on the blackboard with his number, Alf."
          "He said he wanted to talk with you about some man with one arm and one leg."
          "What?"
          "He said a soldier. He was mixing up his words. I couldn't understand him."
          "What kind of soldier? That doesn't make too much sense, Alf."
          "He kept burping while he talked. He said his grandfather was a Texas ranger. What's a Texas ranger?"
          Oh, boy, I thought.
          "How about Elrod T. Sykes?" I said.
          "Yeah, that's it."
          Time for an unlisted number, I thought.
          "What was he talking about, Dave?"
          "He was